Religion as opiate
June 27, 2010 by Bill
I had a friend not too many years ago, who was a very talented musician. He drank enough beer daily to float a battleship, and then went on into “recreational” drugs. A Christian fundamentalist got “a hold” of him and told him that Jesus was the answer, and so, my musician friend became “born again,” lived almost full time with the fundamentalists, and switched his dependency addiction from beer to Jesus. He became a Jesus nut, going around town trying to save everybody, reading the Bible to them, with amens and hallelujahs tossed out like confetti. He was a Jesus addict. He just switched from beer to Jesus for his high.
He cracked up after a year of this Jesus drug and had to go to an institution where they had specialists who helped people withdraw from the addiction of Biblical fundamentalism. Members of Fundamentalists Anonymous helped him return to a normal and healthy life style. (Fundamentalists Anonymous, by the way, is almost as big now as Alcoholics Anonymous.)
It was Karl Marx who said that “religion is the opium of the people.” Professionals in today’s health sciences are saying that when it comes to Biblical illiteracy (Biblical literalism), and the simplistic and childish fundamentalist religion, that Marx was correct in his observation. Seminars today are being held everywhere on religious addiction. There is a national religion-addiction hot line.
The Reverend Doctor Leo Booth, an Episcopal minister, writes that religious addiction is a progressive disease. In his popular book, When God Becomes a Drug, he lists the signs and behavior patterns of “God” and “Jesus” addicts.
EARLY STAGE: Excessive Bible study and church going; all issues are clear black and white; thinking only of church; quoting the Bible constantly; attending all church functions.
MIDDLE STAGE: Using church or prayer to avoid problems; excessive Bible reading; financial contributions to the church beyond your ability to pay; feeling guilt when missing a church function; isolation from other people not in the church; non-religious family members are judged “lost” and former friends who are not religious are avoided; inability to discuss religious issues unemotionally; conflict with work; sex seen as dirty; loss of other interests; the attempt to brainwash family and friends on the Bible and Jesus.
ADVANCED STAGE: Radical deterioration of relationships; physical and mental deterioration; sexual compulsive/obsessive behavior; sexual acting out (i.e. Jimmy Swaggart and prostitutes); preaching that sex is dirty; loss of family and friends; unreasonable resentment; lengthy crusades; mission work; getting messages from God; talking to Jesus; inability to make decisions; physical and emotional exhaustion.
There is no doubt that you have seen former friends and family members who have become “born again” religious addicts pass through some or all of these stages. I know that I have, dozens and dozens of times over the years.
Worship of the Bible
June 20, 2010 by Bill
For a great many, the Bible itself has become an object of worship, an idol. Perhaps the most malignant disease in the Christian church today is Biblical literalism – believing that every word is to be read as the divine, without error, word of God.
The Oxford Universal Dictionary defines Christian fundamentalism in these words: “…strict adherence to a literal inerrancy of the Bible.” Inerrancy means “without error.”
The irony of all this is that anyone with even a sophomoric exposure to church history knows that a great many of our more eminent church fathers, theologians and biblical scholars, have either thrown out, or ignored, various sections of the Bible as not being authentic or worthy of canonization.
Martin Luther, the “father” of our Protestant Reformation, called The Book of Esther a ringing tale of sex and slaughter. His loathing of the Jews was an extension of his view of the Old Testament, which he did not regard as divine. He called The Book of James in the New Testament, a “book of straw,” and he would have nothing to do with The Book of Revelation, viewing it as beyond human reason or comprehension.
I could continue through church history with similar illustration. The stupidities of Biblical literalism defy the imagination. Example: If I wrote a column stating that we, as human beings, are nothing but animals, like all other animals, and nothing more, I would be excoriated as a “secular humanist,” a blasphemer, an atheist and one who did not believe in the Bible.
And yet God’s “without error” Word tells me just that. In Chapter 3 of The Book of Ecclesiastes, God tells us: “…the sons of men may see that they are but as beasts. For the fate of the sons of men and the fate of beasts is the same; as one dies, so dies the other. They all have the same breath, and man has no advantage over the beasts; all go to one place; all are from the dust and all turn to dust again.”
God, the verb
June 13, 2010 by Bill
In our quest for spiritual maturity, it is just mandatory that we understand our own childish habit of anthropomorphizing an external God through human imagination. In thousands of churches every Sunday, God is presented as something out there separate and apart from us and the rest of the creation. And he is presented as having all of the human emotions that we know.
There is an alternative perspective for those sensitive souls who are embarrassed by these archaic images. Buckminster Fuller said it best: “God is a verb, not a noun. God is not legislative code…and not proclamation law…and not ecclesiastic dogma and canon. God is a verb, the most active verb connoting the vast harmonic reordering of the Universe from unleashed chaos of energy.”
There is an ancient Chinese text that is completely in harmony with modern physics. “There is no Creator (out there). Everything produces itself and is not produced by others. This is the Natural way of the Universe.”
There is no Creator. There is only Creativity. And the word symbol “God” represents the creative energy that is inherent in the Universe and in all human experience.
We do not live today with the primitive and superstitious cosmology of a 3,000-year-old biblical age. We live today by the cosmology of Copernicus and Galileo and watching Earth rise from the surface of the moon.
We are still spiritually childish when we “seek” God. To “seek” something is to make an object of it and a subject of oneself. “Summoned or not summoned, God is here,” says a Greek oracle that demolishes school prayer, by the way. “God is the Nature and Flow of the Universe.” The “flea and God are One.” The “dung in the stable” and God are One, as Eckhart put it. Meister Eckhart, over 700 years ago, got it and understood it light years ahead of the church, who wanted to burn him at the stake. He also wrote, “to go around looking for God is like sitting on an ox looking for an ox to ride” and “do you want to see God? Look in a mirror” and “to watch a child pouring water into a glass is to watch God pouring God into God.”
Today, Deepak Chopra gets it. In answer to a question in an interview, “Are you an atheist?” Chopra said: “I was an atheist until I discovered that I was God.”
